"O here is my hand," the stranger reply'd,

have heard him had he shouted at the top of his voice. "Well, that was what you wanted, wasn't it?" I asked bitterly. "What I wanted! My God, man, that missile mechanism" "I don't give a single solitary damn about the missile mechanism." I ground the words out between clenched teeth. "Six months from now other scientists will have invented something twice as good and ten times as secret. They're welcome to it, and with pleasure." Hillcrest was shocked, but said nothing. But someone was in agreement with me. "Hear, hear!" Zagero had just come up, his hands swathed to the size of boxing gloves in white bandages. The words were light enough, but his face was grim and his eyes bleak as he stared out across the glacier. "My sentiments exactly, Doc. To hell with their murderous little toys. My old man's in that buggy out there. And your girl." "His girl?" Hillcrest turned, looked sharply at me under creased brows for a long moment, then murmured: "Sorry, boy, I didn't understand." I made no response, but twisted my head as I heard footsteps behind me. It was Joss, hatless and gloveless in his excitement. "Wykenham's anchored, sir," he panted out. "Her" "Get down, man! They'll see you." "Sorry." He dropped to his hands and knees. "Her powerboat's already moving inshore. And there was a flight of four Scimitars already airborne: they should be half-way here already. In two minutes'-time four or five bombers are taking off, with HE and incendiaries. They're slower, but" "Bombers?" I snapped irritably. "Bombers? What do they think this isthe Second Front?" "No sir. They're going to clobber the trawler if Smallwood gets away with that missile mechanism. They won't get a hundred yards." "The hell with their missile mechanism. Do human lives mean nothing to them? What is it, Jackstraw?" "Lights, Dr Mason." He pointed to the spot on the fjord wall where the men from the trawler had already covered two-thirds of the horizontal and vertical distance to the end of the glacier. "Signalling, I think." I saw it right away, a small light, but powerful, winking irregularly. I watched it for a few moments then heard Joss's voice. "It's morse, but it's not our morse, sir." "They're hardly likely to signal in English just for our benefit," I said dryly. I tried to speak fps and digital video camera calmly, to hide the fear, the near despair in my mind, and when I spoke again my voice, I knew, was abnormally matter-of-fact. "It's the tip-off to our friends Small-wood and Corazzini. If we can see the men from the trawler, it's a cinch the men from the trawler can see us. The point is, do Smallwood and Corazzini understand them?" Five seconds later I had my answer in the form of a suddenly deepening roar coming to us across the glacier from the engine of the Citroen. CorazziniHillcrest's binoculars had shown him to be the driverhad understood the danger all right, he was casting caution to the winds and gunning the engine to its maximum. He must have been desperate, desperate to the point of madness, for no sane man would have taken the fearful risks of driving that tractor through sloping crevasse ice with the friction coefficient between treads and surface reduced almost to zero. Or could it be that he just didn't know the suicidal dangers involved? After a few seconds I was convinced he didn't. In the first place, I couldn't see either Corazzini or Smallwood as men who would panic under pressure, no matter how severe that pressure, and in the second place suicidal risks weren't absolutely necessary, they would have stood a more than even chance of getting away with their lives and the -missile mechanism if they had stopped the tractor, got out and picked their cautious way down the glacier on foot, with their pistol barrels stuck in the backs of their hostages. Or would theyrather, did they think they would? I tried fleetingly, frantically, to get inside their cold and criminal minds, to try to understand their conception of us. Did they think that we thought, like them, that the mechanism was all important, that human lives were cheap and readily expendable? If they did, and guessing the quality of Jackstraw's marksmanship with a rifle, would they not be convinced that they would be shot down as soon as they had stepped out on to the ice, regardless of the fate of their hostages? Or did they have a better understanding than that of minds more normal than their own? Even as these thoughts flashed through my mind I knew I must act now. The time for thought, had there ever been such a time, was past. If they were left to continue in the tractor, they would either kill themselves on the glacier or if, by a miracle, they reached the bottom safely, they would then kill their